by Brianna Crandall — November 3, 2017 — The British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM) published last week a new Good Practice Guide, adding to its already extensive suite of useful resources for facilities management (FM) professionals at any stage in their career. The guide is intended to help FMs do their part to improve both client and employee retention.
The new Good Practice Guide to Customer Experience, takes a holistic look at the entirety of the interactions and experiences that a customer encounters, from beginning to end. Customer service references are often based around singular interactions and service delivery — and though this is incredibly important, it is only one qualifiable entity along the whole customer journey, points out BIFM.
This Good Practice Guide is concerned with every aspect: everyone and everything a client may encounter; every individual conversation and interaction; the comfort and ambience of the environment they are in; the attention to detail; the ease of equipment, processes and communication. In essence, this guide covers how the entirety of their navigation from start to finish makes the customer feel, and what to do to improve the impression that they take away from their experience.
More than ever, businesses are seeing the value in improving the whole client experience, whether it’s for a commercial advantage or retention of both customers and employees — but it’s important to note that aspects of what make a good customer experience are constantly changing and there is always something that can be improved upon, says BIFM.
The group notes that there are a whole host of materials available to businesses to try and make their stakeholder’s experience as positive as it can be, and with such a subjective concern, it is naturally impossible to identify a single “right” way. This customer service guide aims to bring some of the plethora of advice that is out there together into one useful guide, while also finding ways to utilize that advice to map and analyze an existing customer experience, and then build on it to make improvements.
Beth Goodyear of FMHS Consulting and author of the Good Practice Guide said:
Many of us have been on customer service training courses, spent hours deliberating about ways to improve customer experience, and have learnt and developed some great tools. Our challenge is to find the ways that we feel comfortable with, that we don’t feel disingenuous doing, and that really make a difference.
The Customer Experience Good Practice Guide is available to download free (BIFM members) or to order (BIFM non-members) from the BIFM Web site, along with the group’s other Good Practice Guides.
